Total full-time equivalent employees dropped a bit in March compared to a year earlier, with small gains at a number of airlines offsetting sizeable drops at American Airlines and Delta Air Lines.

The U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics said FTE jobs totaled 534,389 in March, down 1,586 from March 2012. American reported a drop of 6,464 jobs, while Delta reported a 3,129-job decline. Southwest Airlines including AirTran Airways declined 324 to 45,791.

But other major carriers, including No. 1 United Airlines, US Airways, JetBlue Airways and Alaska Airlines each added hundreds of jobs. Regional carrier American Eagle topped to gains at 1,339 additional jobs.

Here’s a list of the largest U.S. passenger carriers plus some others.

U.S. airlines had a higher rate of late flights, cancelled flights, reports of lost bags and complaints in February than in February 2012. I think we’ve covered the gamut.

Here are the stats. A flight is considered on time if it arrives within 14 minutes of schedule. The mishandled bag rate is per 1,000 passengers. Denied boardings are per 10,000 passengers. Complaints are per 100,000 passengers. All numbers are for February 2013 with comparisons to February 2012, with the exception of denied boardings, which compares fourth quarter 2012 to fourth quarter 2011.

U.S. airlines reported that 81 percent of their flights arrived on time or within 14 minutes of schedule in January, a drop of 5.2 percentage points from the same month in 2012.

The biggest declines in performance came with three regional carriers: American Eagle, down 10.7 points; Mesa Air, down 9.0 points; and ExpressJet, down 7.7 points.

In the the Bureau of Transportation Statistics report Tuesday, Southwest Airlines ranked sixth among the 16 carriers that reported results, down 4.2 points. American Airlines finished 10th at 79.4 percent, down 5.1 points. Its merger partner, US Airways, finished seventh at 83.0 percent, down 6.3 points.

JetBlue Airways doesn’t overbook, so it consistently has very few passengers denied boarding: 0.01 passengers were bumped involuntarily per 10,000 passengers in 2012, same as in 2011. Translated, it bumped only 39 of its 26.9 million passengers in 2012 (plus another 245 who voluntary gave up their seats for compensation).

The worst in 2012 was Mesa Airlines, with 2.54 passengers per 10,000. But SkyWest showed the biggest decline in performance, with 2.32 bumps per 10,000 in 2012, a 241.2 percent increase over its 2011 rate.

Showing the best improvement over 2011 were American Eagle, with a 52.2 percent decline in its rate of bumps; US Airways, a 27.7 percent decline; Alaska Airlines, down 23.2 percent; and American Airlines, down 19.6 percent.

Southwest Airlines led the U.S. airline industry with the lowest rate of complaints, with 0.25 complaints per 100,000 passengers. That’s 285 complaints registered with the U.S. Department of Transportation, out of 112.3 million passengers carrier.

Worst for the year was United Airlines, with 4.24 complaints per 100,000. That was more than twice the next worst carrier, American Airlines, with 1.8 complaints per 100,000.

Let us also recognize the performance of Mesa Air, which carried 623,271 passengersin December and not a one sent a complaint to DOT. United again captured the bottom of the list, a little worse than American and American Eagle.

If you want to keep your bag, the statistics from 2012 indicate that you’d probably want to fly on Virgin America. American Eagle was most likely to result in a lost bag.

Below are the stats for reports of mishandled bags per 1,000 passengers, for Full Year 2012 and for December 2012, from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Air Travel Consumer Reports.

UPDATE, 11:40 a.m.: History has been made. The DOT said the 2012 rate among the 15 tracked airlines, 3.09 reports of mishandled bags per 1,000 passengers, was “their lowest rate of mishandled baggage for a year since this data was first reported in September 1987.”

mishandled baggage for a year since this data was first reported in September 1987.

With JetBlue Airways’ filing of its December and full year traffic on Friday, we’ve got all the big carriers reporting. Here are some observations (revised Monday, Jan. 14, 2013, after Spirit Airlines reported its December and full year numbers):

– The four largest carriers – United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, American Airlines and Southwest Airlines – all operated less capacity in 2012 than in 2011. The next five carriers increased their capacity.

– United, the world’s largest airline, saw its margin in traffic over No. 2 Delta shrink. In 2011, it led Delta by 13.48 billion revenue passenger miles. In 2012, the lead dropped to 9.85 billion. Put another way, it was 8 percent larger than Delta in 2011, 5.8 percent larger in 2012.

– In capacity, United had a lead of 15.99 billion available seat miles in 2011, 15.48 billion in 2012. United was 7.9 percent larger than Delta in capacity in 2011, 7.7 percent in 2012.

– You may have noticed that the gap shrank more quickly in traffic than capacity. That would indicate that Delta was showing better results on load factor.

– In fact, Delta’s load factor went up 1.7 points to 84.4 percent. United’s went up 0.1 points to 82.9 percent. (United was 0.1 point ahead of Delta in 2011, 1.5 points behind in 2012.)

– Overall for U.S. carriers, traffic in revenue passenger miles and absolute passengers increased only about 1.3 percent in 2012 over 2011.

– Capacity in available seat miles was up less, 0.4 percent, helping the carriers show a 0.7 percentage point increase in load factors, to 83.0 percent.

Here are the charts for the U.S. airlines that we have in hand. Traffic is thousands of revenue passenger miles; capacity is thousands of available seat miles. We put full year results first, followed by December’s results.